Currently, there is an ongoing decentralization process happening in Ukraine in which local authorities get more agency and the local budgets become more independent. For that reason, the team at the Transparent Cities Program works toward advancing the mechanisms of public control of authorities and gives recommendations to the local authorities on how to improve their accountability. That’s exactly why TI Ukraine decided to add new cities to the ranking and to help evaluate their transparency.

Ladyzhyn received 22.55 points out of 100 possible and is the third city to join the primary batch of 100 cities that were evaluated in the rating.

The highest score – 4 points – was given in the sphere of Land Use and Construction Policy. Budgeting Process, Education, and Procurement were also relatively transparent, receiving 3.7, 3.5 and 3.5 points respectively. The scores in the other spheres were not particularly good. Three spheres received zero points. These are: public utility enterprises, social services, and personal matters. This means that citizens do not receive any information about those spheres of the city’s operation and that the authorities are secretive and unaccountable.

Among the highlights, we note that there is an opportunity to sign up for school online and the City Council uses an electronic auction system for the disposition of property.

Khmilnyk’s results were a bit better — 35.75 points out of 100 possible.

The highest score was given in the spheres of Budgeting Process as well as Access and Participation, with 6.5 and 6.1 points, respectively. Additionally, the sphere of Grants and Allocation of Funding received 5 points while the sphere of Land Use and Construction Policy received 5.2 points. The rest of the spheres did not score as high. In two spheres, the city received zero points: Social Services and Housing Property. These are the most non-transparent spheres throughout Ukraine. It means that citizens do not receive any information about those spheres of the city’s operations and that the authorities are secretive and unaccountable.

Among the highlights of the analysis, we noted that the Khmilnyk website has visualized information about public finances and the local budget. Additionally, zoning plans are available, and the participatory budget is working.

We would like to note that you can find more information about the methodology of the research on our website. The full results of the transparency ranking of 100 biggest Ukrainian cities is presented in a format of interactive infographics that is also available for download here.

TI Ukraine continues to work on the issue of transparency in different regions of Ukraine and actively motivates citizens to demand accountability from their representatives and authorities, and we urge local authorities and representatives to be more transparent in their practices. After all, openness and transparency are the basic conditions in order to reduce the level of corruption.